A Bridge not too far away for NAB staff

Illustration: Rod Clement.

As Australia’s federal politicians now brawl over the terms of reference of a royal commission into the financial system, Andrew Thorburn’s National Australia Bank is getting on with his bank’s bold new strategy: shedding its staff.

NAB’s executive general manager of wealth advice, Greg Miller, is shuffling along “The Bridge” (which, you may remember, is NAB’s “best-practice career transition program”).

Spiro Pappas’s role as the EGM of global institutional banking has also been made redundant, although he’s apparently being redeployed rather than travelling the Bridge.

Pappas is moving from Mike Baird’s institutional banking empire into Anthony Healy’s private wealth division. We gather he’s still in negotiations about at what level.

Thorburn raised eyebrows across the downtrodden banking industry when, four weeks ago, he made the axing of 6000 of NAB’s workers the centrepiece of a bumper $6.64 billion annual cash profit.

In a change of approach, the bank is now being much more low key about departures. But Margin Call understands more executive general managers are in the process of being redeployed, possibly to the soon to be highly congested Bridge.

Then attention will turn to the tier below.

To be fair to the bank, it is also hiring a squadron of 2000 digitally savvy new employees.

And it’s still on the hunt, with the help of Katie Lahey’s executive recruiter Korn Ferry, for a new head of government relations.

Although whether a permanent replacement will be found before the just announced $75 million royal commission reports on February 1, 2019, isn’t clear.

One person who won’t be taking the gig is Victoria Somlyay, who previously did the equivalent job at Westpac and, we hear, was right in the mix for the gig.

Instead, Somlyay is off to the sunlit plains of coal giant Anglo American’s Australian headquarter in Brisbane, where as of mid-December she’ll be running corporate relations.

Many happy returns

It was a 70th birthday party fit for Australia’s richest barrister.

Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford and venture capitalist Nick Callinan on Wednesday night threw a birthday party for their fellow Melbourne Club member Allan Myers at the storeyed Collins Street private establishment.

It was a “men-only” party for the supremely well connected Myers, whose fortune of $682m spans investment, agricultural and significant property interests and who, among other things, chairs the National Gallery of Australia and is the chancellor of Melbourne University.

The 100-odd guests seated at the Melbourne Club’s main dining room enjoyed a Frank Sinatra medley by Tom Burlinson (who some might remember for his starring role in the 1982 film The Man from Snowy River).

A club man never talks, but we understand their numbers included former prime ministers Paul Keating and Tony Abbott, “Mr Melbourne” Bruce Parncutt, the departing director of the Myers-chaired National Gallery of Australia NGA Gerard Vaughan and Flagstaff CEO Tony Burgess and the prosperous boutique’s founder Charles Goode, the chairman of the Cormack Foundation, the now contentious Liberal Party donor.

Myers, who actually turned 70 last month, will today represent the Goode-chaired Cormack Foundation in the Federal Court at the first case management for the legal action launched on them by Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger.

For what it’s worth, Kroger is a member of rival Melbourne members-only establishment, The Australian Club.

Interests updated

This week, a year and a half after Australia’s 45th parliament was sworn it, veteran Labor senator Kim Carr updated his statement of registrable interests.

Got there in the end.

Carr says the Usher of the Black Rod had been in touch to tell Carr, who has been in the red chamber since 1993, that there seemed to be something wrong with his paperwork.

A few things were missing, including a house Carr owns with his wife in Pascoe Vale South, in Melbourne’s north, another house he owns in Holder, in Canberra’s west, and a third “holiday/investment” property he owns in Lake Eucumbene, in the Snowy Mountains.

“They were on the wrong form,” Carr explained to us.

Happily, after getting in touch with the Black Rod, Bill Shorten’s 62-year-old spokesman for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research has fixed things up.

Although Margin Call gets the sense that, now in the third decade of his senatorial career, the Victorian Labor factional stalwart is a bit over the self-disclosure regime.

“In this joint these days if you fart someone is going to want to know, ‘Did you have permission?’ ” Carr told us.

Chessell returns

Welcome back to Oz shores our former and respected colleague, and now Fairfax national editor, James Chessell, who was working the room hard at last night’s 62nd Walkley Awards for journalism.

Chessell, formerly AFR Europe correspondent before his leg-up in February, used the awards gathering of media talent to re-establish local connections, including with his boss, Australian Metro Publishing managing director Chris Janz.

Former Nine Today show host and now Ten personality Lisa Wilkinson hosted the event at the Brisbane Convention Centre, which featured a who’s who of local reporters (if that’s not too grand a description for a bunch of journos).

Wilkinson lamented from the stage this week’s unravelling of the Australian edition of the Huffington Post, which until this week was a joint venture with Greg Hywood’s Fairfax, where she has been “editor-at-large” on a six-figure-a-year deal. A bit to worry about there.

That lucrative arrangement was cited by Nine boss Hugh Marks as part of the reason he elected not to re-sign the star this year. The HuffPo deal blocked Wilkinson from Marks’ own digital platforms, including lifestyle website 9Honey.

Notably, Janz formerly ran the HuffPost JV and was appointed as a director of the troubled outlet in June, only to help oversee Fairfax’s departure from the now stand-alone and uncertain operation five months later.

After Wilkinson closed proceedings, winners and losers moved on to the rooftop bar of The Fox Hotel in south Brisbane for a quiet, 12-hour-long wind-down.